‘They just threw him out like trash,’ said the family of one of the buried.
Some 215 bodies were found in a pauper’s cemetery in Raymond, Mississippi. Located just outside of Jackson, the graves are marked with metal rods and numbers. The gravesite is intended for people who have no known family, but according to relatives, they were never contacted by officials.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is representing the families of Marrio Moore, Dexter Wade, and Jonathan Hankins, who were all buried in the cemetery without the knowledge of their families.
“It’s like they just threw him out like trash, just like they did with the others,” Gretchen Hankins, the mother of Jonathan Hankins, told Fox Affiliate WBLT.
Activist Arthur Reed, who works with Crump, recently visited the gravesite. Reed stated that the deceased are put in body bags and placed into shallow graves. The activist described his visit in an interview with Fox 26‘s Isaiah Carey.
“The stench from the bodies are drawing buzzards…it’s so inhumane for anybody to do anyone like that, Isaiah it’s just horrible,” he said.
Wade was hit and killed by a police vehicle. Although the victim had an identification, Wade’s family was not notified of his death. The family thought he was missing until they recently learned that he was buried in the pauper’s cemetery.
Reverend Hosea Hines, the senior pastor of the Christ Tabernacle Church and the national leader for A New Day Coalition of Equity and Black America, spoke to The Chicago Crusader, and he said he empathized with the families.
“It really saddens my heart to know that their relatives went that long, some over a year, not knowing if their loved ones were dead or alive and then coming to the realization that they had been buried in a pauper’s grave behind a jailhouse,” he said.
He went on to point out that these oversights did not occur under the watch of the current Jackson police chief, Joseph Wade. According to Hines, the police chief has implemented a new death notification policy that will provide relatives with a notification and details about their loved one’s deaths.
Crump and his co-counsel, Dennis Sweet, expressed their commitment to getting justice for the deceased and their families.
“People all across America are scratching their heads in disbelief about what’s happening in Jackson, Mississippi, with this pauper’s graveyard,” said Crump during a press conference.
“It went from talking about the water” that was non-existent or contaminated “to now we’re talking about the graveyard. What is going on in Jackson, Mississippi?”
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